Friday, March 9, 2012

EPUB 3, KF8, iBooks Author, it was all there. There are some cool new tools like Inkling’s authoring tool and Wolfram’s interactive CDF (Computational Document Format) file format and associated creation tools. For those that like to see a e-book code in action, have a look at Digital Bindery’s EPUB 3 slides—you’ll find lots of great code snippets in the slides, plus they have a list of some of their favourite tools and a sample EPUB 3 file on their website that you can break apart. O’Reilly’s e-book team showed some great slides of their e-book workflow (have a look at slide 11), showing how they tweak and adapt their original XML file to produce all the individual file formats.

Saturday, February 25, 2012

The CSS from an epub file must be converted (by kindlegen) to HTML 3.2 attributes in the mobi file, so keeping the CSS extremely simple is always the best approach. Unfortunately, the only way to find out what works best (or at all) is through trial and error (and of course by looking through the threads here at MR to find what others may have stumbled upon).

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Many scientists recognize the harm done by restrictive scientific publishers that control use of the scientific literature. In 2002, the Budapest Open Access Initiative called for applying two principles in scientific publishing: access for everyone at the main publication site, and freedom for everyone to redistribute exact copies (and do other things with them too).

The second principle is stronger. In practice, it implies the first: if everyone has the freedom to redistribute copies of articles, university libraries will mirror the articles, making them accessible to everyone. However, the term "open access" refers to the weaker first principle and not to the second. That makes it a weak term.

I signed the BOAI statement. I had misgivings about the name, after seeing how philosophical opponents of the Free Software Movement had used the term "open source" to downplay our concerns about freedom, but I put them aside because the substance was correct.

My misgivings later proved valid: some influential supporters subsequently dropped the second principle. In effect, the weak name overcame the strong substance.

To return to the correct substance of the the BOAI, we should drop the term "open access publishing", and talk about "redistributable publishing" or "free-to-copy publishing". These terms focus on the stronger second principle, so they will resist weakening.

This is very cool, and provides e-publishers another opportunity for publishing content.

On a philosophical note, this move away from eyes on Web sites to mobile apps is interesting. On the Web (either envisioned by the "regal" Tim Berners-Lee or the "rogue" Ted Nelson), the idea is that of going from site to site by hyperlinks. You are one site one minute and less than a minute later you are on some site that may have little relation to the first.

An app is not like that. An app is something of a closed world. Within an app, you don't "click" on something in the app and jump from that app to another app like you do from site to site. You basically stay within that app. An ebook (.epub) on a mobile device (read within yet another app, an e-reader app), is like a closed world too.

(Of course a "Web browser" on a mobile device is an app on its own, but the tools listed above create their own apps.)

2012/02/07 (via comment on Google+): The organization eptcs.org appears like it provides publications exactly along the lines of arXiv ReviewJournal of <whatever subject area>. (And apparently this organization has funding and people to maintain their site. That is critical.)

So if this organization (or parallel organizations) could take on all of arXiv.org subject areas, then the process seems pretty much along the way of being resolved. (And include Journals as well as Proceedings.)

(Note in the bibtex of the above example: publisher = "Open Publishing Association". There you go!)

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

There's been a bit of discussion on Google+ (John Baez - Jan 30, 2012) on the future of costly scientific journals. As print fades into history, there is no reason why scientists cannot have a system where their so-called pre-publications (e.g. on arXiv.org, a current source for many of these) can be reviewed, and with revisions acceptable to a peer community be qualified as being designated as published.

Proposal: arXiv.org continues as it is and some group creates arXiv-Review.org (completely independent of arXiv.org) that accomplishes the intended goal of reviewing the articles of arXiv.org. When an article on arXiv.org gets a pass from the arXiv-Review.orgscientific peer community, it's designated as published.

(The problem, as has been pointed out, is for some group to actually go and create arXiv-Review.org.)

What would be the result? A free and open article submission and access system as it exists now (arXiv.org) and a independent review system (arXiv-Review.org).

arXiv-Review is an openly accessible, moderated forum for commenting on and reviewing arXiv.org articles. (For information about arXiv, see arXiv.org/help/primer). To provide for this, each article submitted to arXiv can potentially have a review thread in arXiv-Review for comments and reviews.

Each review thread in arXiv-Review is identified by following the same reference scheme described in arxiv.org/help/faq/references. For example, corresponding to arXiv:math/9910001v1 <http://arXiv.org/abs/math/9910001v1> is a potential review thread arXiv-Review:math/9910001v1 <http://arXiv-Review.org/rev/math/9910001v1>.

Browsing arXiv-Review is open to everyone (the "readers"). Those who comment on and review articles (the "reviewers") must register on arXiv-Review. In addition, a reviewer may be a member of a select "board" (TBD) on arXiv-Review (and this identification will indicated).

"Every publisher should have a publishing workflow." There is nothing novel about that. There is a base format (for the publisher) from which all publications are born. EPUB 3 is a candidate. Or something more general involving HTML5, XML, any combination of these with CSS and JS, etc.

The publisher might have their own EPUB with some additions (e.g. Apple's fixed-layout EPUB). The point is the base format is fixed, and from the base format all other formats flow. I'll just call the publisher's own base format EPUB Me, and the file extension .epme (though it might just be .epub following the appropriate specification).

There are various channels the publisher distributes through. These will likely require a conversion from EPUB Me to another format. Take Amazon's KF8 as an example. Thankfully, Amazon has provided a document and a tool for enabling the publisher to covert EPUB Me to KF8. The publisher first has to convert — how this is done is technology adopted or developed by the publisher — their own .epme to a .epub+ that KindleGen can accept. (That's where the document comes in: to define what type of HTML+CSS Amazon will accept either in .epub form or a directory of HTML+CSS+image files.) KindleGen will output .kf8.

Apple's format is not so simple: How do you go from .epme to .ibooks? Given the restrictions of iBooks Author, one way would be to use an EPUB to DOC converter (EPUBtoDOC*, or E2D for short), import the DOC file into iBooks Author, and edit (hopefully without a lot of work) what is there to make it right for delivery in the Apple channel.

The key to this workflow is that the original source.epmebelongs to the publisher alone and not to the channel on which it's distributed. output.ibooks may be "owned" by Apple, but source.epme is owned by the publisher.

iBooks Author seems pretty much like a black hole though. One might manage somehow to get EPUB in, but one can't get anything useful, like EPUB 3 (other than Apple's proprietary format), out.

I.e.: From authors/publishers point of view, they need to feed into the Apple .ibooks format if that turns out to be useful for them, but keep their original source (their .epme) separate, so they can feed that same source independently into different channels as well.

This workflow model can be extended to any number of distribution channels.

Saturday, January 14, 2012

Here are the "container" formats for e-publishers to distribute in this year. There are a bunch of older ones which don't appear much anymore* after 2011, The Year Of The E-Reader. (Some said 2010 was that Year, but it was really last year.)

As mentioned above, Amazon will "replace" MOBI with KF8 (sort of, and not yet for its E Ink Touch reader). PDF will stay around as long as people have printers (though fixed-layout EPUB replaces a lot of its non-reflow "features"), Flash will be edged out. HTML5 will rule.